The Rise Of Experts Brought The Decline Of Reason

For 200 years, says John Ralston Saul, Western civilization has been going downhill, head first.

In ``Voltaire`s Bastards,`` his provocative reading of European and American history since the 18th Century, Saul argues that all the evils of modern society can be traced to one fundamental error. By misinterpreting the teachings of the great minds of the Enlightenment, we have become their illegitimate intellectual offspring. In the process we so crippled ourselves that we no longer have a clear vision of our political problems, let alone a chance of solving them.

``While not blind, we see without being able to perceive the differences between illusion and reality,`` says Saul.

Just before the French and American Revolutions, Western thought underwent a profound change. Thinkers like Voltaire and Rousseau taught that the key to reforming the outdated society of their day was to subject all political questions to the scrutiny of reason, a proposal that quickly became the hallmark of modern thought. Unfortunately, subsequent generations twisted that methodology, generating thereby the intellectual straitjacket that now cripples us.

``Were Voltaire to reappear today, he would be outraged by the new structures, which somehow deformed the changes for which he struggled,`` Saul says.

Indeed, our intellectual elites have become as oppressive as the kings and aristocrats of Voltaire`s age. For in contemporary society, knowledge has become the means by which cadres of experts and technocrats dominate everybody else.

``Reason now has a great deal in common with the last days of the ancient regime,`` says Saul, who has a Ph.D. in history from London University and has been a business executive in Europe and North America.

The triumph of expertise has made democracy virtually irrelevant, Saul claims. Public officials no longer debate the right or wrong of a proposal. Instead, they send for the experts, to whose presumed special knowledge they defer.

For Saul, the perfect symbol of this shift is Robert McNamara, secretary of defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and a technocrat par excellence. For McNamara, all questions could be reduced to data entries in a computer program. Thus he could go directly from running the Vietnam War, a questionable exercise in late colonialism, to trying to solve the Third World`s problems as head of the World Bank. In fact, McNamara was no more successful at the latter than the former task, but no matter. Modern experts no longer hold themselves to the standard of success: By their understanding, their special knowlege gives them a right to rule that they refuse to subject to external criticism.

Thus corporation executives pay themselves larger salaries, even as profits shrink, and generals get more medals even as their Star Wars weapon systems fail the test of battlefield reality. To prevent criticism, the experts wrap themselves in a veil of jargon only they can understand.

``In many ways the differences between various languages today are less profound than the differences between the professional dialects within each language,`` Saul observes. ``There is no language available for outsiders who wish to criticize intelligently.``

``Voltaire`s Bastards`` is hardly light reading, but readers who stick with it will be rewarded with a whole new way of looking at the political mess we currently inhabit.